The Department of Education is taking a new approach to safety this year, but police will still be roving the halls.
At first, it was jarring, but Andrea Colon got used to it — the surveillance cameras, the officers standing guard, going about their rounds, always watching you. She wasn’t an inmate exactly but she was doing time, at least until she graduated.
Then one day Colon, a junior at Rockaway Park High School, saw something that snapped her out of it. There was a commotion in the hallway and she stepped out of her classroom to see what it was all about. A fight had broken out between five or six boys, all of whom were black or brown, she recalls.
Colon watched as an NYPD school safety agent pressed one of them against a wall, choking him. One of her teachers, a big guy who was an Army reservist, body-slammed another to the ground. When one of the fighters attempted to walk away, the assistant principal told a safety agent to put him in handcuffs and announced he was calling the local precinct. Any student who was in the hall when backup arrived would be leaving in a squad car too, he said.
“It was just about criminalizing students of color,” says Colon. “They were going...